Danny Boyle's Foot

What happened? He started the year with a broken foot, and played like a guy playing 25 minutes a game with a broken foot.

Why was this important? At his age, Boyle needs to have his ice-time managed, especially during the regular season. By insisting on playing through his injury, he actually hurt his team. In the big picture, letting guys like Boyle dictate their readiness explains some of the lack of cohesiveness in the Sharks team play, I think. As important as they are to the overall success of this team, the coaching staff can't let the veteran players have that much say in running the team.

Lose a Poorly Played Game, Cancel Practice

What happened? Todd McLellan would routinely cancel practices or make them optional following losses.

Why was this important? Here's another aspect of how the Sharks just looked out of sync for most of the year. West Coast teams don't have as much practice time due to the more grueling travel, and the Sharks had a crazy schedule with a very light first half, and a very heavy final quarter. But all year the Sharks struggled to play as a 5 man unit (or 4 man unit in the case of the PK). At least some of that could have been rectified with more practice, particularly after losses where the Sharks looked reactive and overly reliant on one or two players to win the game for them. At the very least, making practices required after poor efforts is as clear of a message as you can get that the previous game's results are unacceptable.

Getting Killed on the Kill

What happened? Our PK was shit, all year, and everyone knew it.

Why was this important? Well, it was basically our undoing. It turned a decent even strength team into a bottom seed. It highlighted our terrible team defense. It lost us a ton of games. The coaching staff had no answers for it, which makes them seem either incompetent or ineffective.

Subtraction by Subtraction

What happened? All our roster moves last off-season didn't work out very well.

Why was this important? Doug Wilson made some big gambles by bringing in Brent Burns, Martin Havlat, Michal Handzus, Colin White, and Jim Vandermeer. Most of those moves were done to shore up our defense, which was exposed as a fatal weakness by the Canucks last postseason. Burns had an ok year, but didn't turn into the type of 2-way defenseman everyone had hoped he would be. White and Vandermeer were supposed to provide some veteran stay-at-home minute eating, but instead were destroyed in the scoring chance department by 1st and 4th liners alike. Handzus (a player that probably shouldn't have even been signed given McLellan's line-matching predilictions), couldn't handle 3rd or 4th line duties vs. other non-scoring lines, and was basically a shootout specialist by the spring. Despite some improvement in league-wide defensive stats, our blueline and defensive forwards were just as poor at preventing goals when playing with the lead as the 2010-11 Sharks. Havlat was injured for most of the year, but was a critical source of speed and creativity when he finally got back in the lineup. His play wasn't enough to kickstart a sputtering offense in the playoffs, though.

The Fucking Churchill Quote

What happened? In December before one of the home games, a quote from Winston Churchill was put on each of the players lockers, with the idea of inspiring the team to overcome challenges and rise to the occasion, etc. The same quote was brought back during the 1st round series vs. the Blues.

Why was this important? Do I even need to describe how the games that followed were some of the least inspired hockey the Sharks played in a pretty underwhelming year? The steely resolve exhibited by the people of Great Britain during World War II was not the end result. Instead, an equally British sense of resignation, passivity, and irony at the world going to hell around them took over.

A common criticism of Patrick Marleau is that his production disappears for long stretches of time, that he is streaky. The underlying assumption is that other players with similar points totals and salary are more consistent offensive threats, and, theoretically, the Sharks would have been better off giving Marleau's ice-time and money to someone else.

I don't buy this theory, to be absolutely transparent about my bias. Most elite players will have cold streaks, and the goodwill (or not) of a fanbase will color their perception of how those cold streaks are perceived. Marleau's talent is extremely difficult to replace, in any case, and, given the same level of scrutiny, there are only a handful of players in the league that would outshine him (and they tend to not move teams often, if at all).

I decided to test out the streakiness theory by comparing Marleau to another elite goal scorer at a similar stage of his career, Marian Hossa. I looked at the 2010-11 regular season and compared their stats and cold streaks (2 or more games without a point).

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Why the Sharks brass needs to deal with injuries during the regular season.

Since we're celebrating Heinous Injury Disclosure Day, it's a good chance to review all the brutal medical problems hockey players suck up and play through that would leave most people moaning and trolling for sympathy on TwitterBook. Dany Heatley, for one, had a broken hand for most of the latter part of the regular season. He suffered a groin pull last year, and I had thought his drop-off in points and net play this year was related to that injury. While I realize most of the injuries to Thornton, Clowe, Demers, and Couture occurred in the playoffs, I'm going to use Heatley's hand injury as an example of one of the factors for why we sputter out in the 2nd or 3rd round.

Why letting them play through injury is incredibly stupid

The obvious reason is that the player continues to be injured, and that's reflected in their play. A less obvious reason is that the players further down on the depth chart don't get playing time to jump into that players slot, and force the team to adapt to an injury.

The main reason it's stupid is because standing points don't matter if you're too banged up and broken to play well for an extended period of time. Let me repeat that. Standing points don't matter as long as you're in the playoffs. Detroit knows this. They'll take their core players out during the regular season, and even the playoffs, to heal. Along with that is the expectation that the team and the replacement players will pick up the slack, and they'll get the players back for a further push.

Take a look at the extremely tight Western Conference. Being the #2 seed gave us an outrageously physical series vs. the Kings that caused some of the injuries that helped doom us in the 3rd round. Then we got the #3 Wings, where Clowe got Kronwalled and the rest of the Sharks got further bumped and bruised. The Canucks in the top-seed spot got a tough Blackhawks team, and then the #5 Predators, who played fairly well against Vancouver in a very physical series. The Wings started off against the #6 Coyotes, who probably should have been a tougher opponent than they actually were.

Would the Shark's path have been significantly tougher if we had lost some games during the regular season and ended up as a #3 or #4 or #5 seed? It sure doesn't look like it. If anything, we've done the Blackhawks and Canucks the courtesy of knocking out the Wings in the 2nd round both years. Back east, the #5 Lightning are in the ECF, after knocking out the Penguins and Capitals.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. If a player has a healable injury, take the long view and sit them, even if they say they'll play through it. Then they can come back and make an impact when it counts. Even when they get their playoff injuries, they're not going to be as severe. In the case of Heatley, he may have avoided his twisted ankle if he hadn't been playing with a broken hand that forced him to overcompensate.

Editor's note: Swedish journalist, sandwich enthusiast, and author Stieg Larsson died in 2004 at age 50 before he posthumously found success with his "Millenium" trilogy ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," "The Girl Who Played with Fire," and "The Girl Who Shook the Hornet's Nest"), which have become international bestsellers and have been adapted to films in Sweden, and soon the United States. The novels are about the investigations of journalist Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist and young, troubled computer hacker Lisbeth Sander into financial fraud, serial killers, human trafficking, and sexual violence. Larsson's estate recently uncovered a nearly complete unpublished manuscript of a fourth "Millenium" novel. Here are some excerpts from "The Girl Who Played with Ice." It may not make any sense unless you've read the books or seen the movies, but you can get the gist I think.

Lisbeth Sander, computer hacker, realistic lover of dumpy middle aged journalist Mikael Blomkvist

Lisbeth Sander scowled as she sat in her luxurious 97 square meter apartment in the Hjeckrønssform district of Stockholm, staring at the 12" screen of her Apple PowerMac laptop computer, with a 1 gigaherz G4 processor, 512 megabytes of random access memory, 16 megabytes of graphics memory, a 2 gigabyte hard drive, and a 56.6 megabits per second modem. She didn't need the modem, because she just had a DSL line installed. [Ed: 12 pages of specifications of the DSL line equipment and installation has been removed.]. The laptop sat on top of an Ikea Gustav desk in birch aspect, and she adjusted her Torbjörn chair, and stared pensively at the Lerberg shelf unit. Sander had just returned from Ikea, and had also purchased [Ed: 4 pages of comma separated names of other Ikea merchandise removed.]

Gustav desk

"Kalle fucking Blomkvist," she thought. How could he still be in her head? She was an orphan in her early twenties, heavily tattood, bisexual, with piercings everywhere, a computer hacker, and not at all a figment of anyone's fevered, desperate sexual fantasies. "Kalle fucking Blomkvist," she repeated as she opened up a message from Blomkvist in the Eudora email computer program. It had an attachment. It was a 412 kilobyte PDF document. She opened it up in Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.2, and stared at the spinning hourglass. In 12 seconds she had read and processed everything in the PDF document that Blomkvist had sent her, and could remember every word due to her photographic memory. The document proved that every Swede playing on the Detroit Red Wings, plus Pavel Datsyuk, was a vicious sex criminal.

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St. Nic has deceptive size

Stoic old St. Niclas
Lean your beard this way
When you score a single goal
Everyone says, "No way!"
Overtime is coming soon
Now you dear old man
Whisper what your secret is
Tell me if you can

When the clock is counting down
When the puck goes deep
Down the left side, broad and white,
Into the zone you creep
All the burgers you will find
Lined up in a row
Yours will be the tallest one
If you score that OT goal

Yawney wants to see you skate
After Doug gave you a payday
FTF thinks you're overpaid
All that green makes Evilducks see red
But I think it's up to you
With a blueline that's thin at best
Earn your keep, dear Nic Wallin
For the Sharks Lord Stanley quest

Ok, gloom and doomers, time to cheer the hell up! It's the Magical Holiday Season, where spoiled children get Ovechkin jerseys to give the family some joy for the first time since Daddy got in trouble and Nicole the au-pair had to move out!

You're all doing something wrong in this picture

So, in this spirit of giving and happiness, I'd like to present the first of what I hope is many Sharksmas Carols you all can sing as you gather around the Kelp Tree and drink some hot chum. Here's that old winter-time classic, "Let it Clowe".

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Over the last couple years, I've noticed that a lot of posters here at Fear the Fin, and on the Battle of California, have complained about Puck Daddy and what they perceived as an anti-San Jose tone to their posts. While I don't read Puck Daddy as much lately, I've noted some occasional sucker punches, typically digs at our lack of postseason success, or more specific jibes of the "Joe Thornton isn't a big-time player" variety.

Whatever, it's a snarky blog, and it's probably just like how every hockey fan thinks the opponent's broadcasting team are sniveling homers. As a Sharks fan it's annoying hearing the same insults over and over, but that's what fans of underachieving teams get, apparently. Wings fans aren't better people because the team they cheer for perennially contends. I like hockey and like my local team, who cares what assholes think? But I thought, "I should go compare posts about the Sharks and, say, Wings, and see if any of the bias talk holds up to scrutiny." So I did.

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LeBron James and the cult of the superstar

Well, I didn't watch LeBron's infomercial last night. Apparently it was something about expanding the LeBron James brand (something very, very important to everyone). And ESPN was right there, agreeing to, and relishing, every degrading act they were asked to perform, like a BDSM sub. This is what modern big-time sports looks like.

I'm surprised there wasn't a sideline interview afterward, given by a 23 year old hottie with a BA in communications from USC, with questions like, "King James, what emotions went through your head as you became even more wealthy than any of the people watching will ever hope to be?" Maybe there was. I didn't watch.

Who here is sick of the way Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin are the only players the NHL consistently promotes? Well, if the NHL ever moves back to ESPN, guess which two players are going to be even more relentlessly promoted? That's what ESPN does. Stuart Scott will quickly go through the highlights before putting SidCros on the Budweiser Hot Seat and then counting down Alexander the Great's 10 best goal reactions. They're less about sports journalism and more about sports PR and marketing. It gets viewers, I guess, but, to me, makes the whole undertaking so hollow and unenjoyable I just can't watch SportsCenter any longer.

I mean, sports is meaningless enough without having the utter vapidity of it all rubbed in your face. Big time sports coverage now is millionaires hundreds of times over preening and mugging for the cameras, and sycophants hanging on their every word and facial reaction. It's a convention of self-important assholes of the type I can't stand in real life. I have no idea why this makes as much money as it does, but all I know is that the NHL's virtue has been being incompetent enough to avoid becoming another Gigantic Douche like the NFL, MLB, and NBA.

So, stay boring, NHL! Keep that TV contract on Vs. or Lifetime or that channel that's just footage of the space shuttle orbiting earth. At least you won't turn into a narcissist factory.

Man, I feel for Calgary's fans. I sometimes feel sorry for myself for cheering on a team that disappoints in the postseason, but what if you had one of the top goalies in the game, one of the best scoring forwards, and a great defense, and squandered all of that every year?

I'm a moderate fan of Darryl Sutter, mostly because he helped pull the Sharks franchise up from being a clown show to being a hard-working playoff upset-maker. But his limitations as a coach eventually became too hard to ignore (disinterest in practicing the power play, a lack of sophistication on offense, a harsh and sarcastic personality), and he was fired a bit before Dean Lombardi got shown the door.

But what has he done as a GM? Hiring Mike Keenan maybe was a nod of respect to Darryl's former boss, but it wasn't a good hockey decision in the post-lockout NHL. He apparently can't manage the salary cap very well, probably because he doesn't seem like the kind of guy that likes making decisions for primarily economic reasons, and he doesn't seem to like delegating responsibilities to specialists.

Now the Flames are missing the playoffs, Iginla and Kipper are a year older, they don't have Dion Phaneuf any more, and they have a lot of money tied up in their current roster. So for all the whining here about the Sharks underperformance (and I'm guilty of it as much as anybody), we could have it much, much worse.

During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, my housemate and I and our friends all picked a team to root for, and then we watched as many of the games as we could together. The rules were simple: choose a team, drink the beer of that country, and talk shit as much as possible.

This Sunday, the spirit of 2002 lives on as we're having a viewing party for the three epic games that day. We'll have an actual Finn in attendance, who is having his family FedEx a box of Finnish beer over. We've already got a heated vodka vs. becherovka rivalry for Russia/Czech Republic.

Let this be an unofficial invitation to do likewise, Fear the Fin.

Choose your country, choose your beverage, and let the petty insults and stereotypes fly!.

Same to you, pal

Why didn't I know that Ray Ratto has a blog called ...And The Horse You Rode In On? Well, call me enlightened, and weep for me because I read his latest entry on the Sharks. ATHYRIO's description is:

Sporting Green columnist Ray Ratto posts his latest barbs on the ugly beauty of pro and college sports.

Sure! Check out this ugly, yet beautiful (not beautiful) barb:

But the acquisition of the veteran defenseman [Niclas Wallin] doesn't make the Sharks the best they can realistically be for the stretch drive and the postseason because, as a largely stay-at-home defenseman who doesn't figure to make much of a scoring dent, there's only so much he can do to affect the Fins in their elusive chase for the second, let alone third or fourth rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Ya burnt, Niclas, Ratto style!

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The Media, bete noir of practically everybody rich/famous/important enough to warrant somebody writing about them, has lately been the subject of more hand-wringing opinion pieces and alarmist rhetoric than any particular person should be subjected to. The other day on NPR (yeah, yeah) I heard someone say, in regard to the destruction of the traditional print media, that the next 10 years are going to be great years if you're a corrupt politician. The implication being that newspapers, with their shrinking ad revenue, readership, and newsroom headcount, will leave dirt undug, muck unraked, and corrupt public servants free to award overexpensive garbage collection contracts to kickbacking insiders. You know, unlike now.

Who knows if all that is true? All I know is that Mark Purdy still has a job, and locker room access, in the South Bay for writing lazy articles that make me wince. For example, this bit of cluelessness about basically being called an idiot by Mike Babcock.

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Who's on Top?

Take this with a heaping dose of rock salt, but check out your division leaders 5 or 6 games into the season:

• NY Rangers
• Buffalo Sabres
• Tampa Bay Lightning
• Colorado Avalanche
• LA Kings
• Columbus Blue Jackets

That, combined with the middling-to-bad starts of some of last year's powerhouse teams (the Red Wings, Bruins, and Sharks), might indicate some league-wide parity this season. Of course, we're dealing with just a few games so far, and nobody has dug themselves too deep of a hole to dig out of (with the possible exception of the Leafs).

This biggest surprise so far are teams that were expected to be terrible this year, like Colorado and Tampa Bay and Phoenix, are actually playing pretty well. This puts pressure on everybody else in their respective divisions, because it's hard to really pile up the points without a punching bag in your division. Remember the good ol' days of the early and mid-aughts, Wings fans, with patsies like the Predators, Blues, and Hawks appearing regularly in your schedule?

Anyway, this might just be an outlier stretch of a couple weeks where things look hopeful for the have-nots, and scary for the haves, before things settle out. But it seems to be making a more competitive league. And I imagine the kinds of hard decisions that the elite teams need to make in a flat salary cap era are having an effect on their ability to maintain consistency from year to year.

Various financial douchebags wrote:

Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.

That should be taken as both a positive hope and a warning for the Sharks and their detractors.

For all the Ducks fans who are laughing at the Sharks for bringing in a talented Cup Finals loser who requested a trade, I give you:
Chris Pronger
Defence
Edmonton Oilers

Worked out pretty well for Anaheim, dinnit? I dunno how it'll work out for the Sharks, but that just goes to show that there's no way to predict these things.

Plank's rivalry depth chart has some good stuff, but I'd order things a little differently.

10. Philadelphia Flyers

Why? Mostly because their fans are obnoxious. Anyone remember that home game a few years back where some Flyers fans pulled down some San Jose Sports Hall of Fame plaques after the game? It's always douchy in Philadelphia, but their fans bring a little on the road as well.

9. St. Louis Blues

This one is for the Darryl Sutter era Sharks fans, and haters of Chris Pronger everywhere. Al MacInnis winding up for a slap shot capable of puncturing the sideboards was a scary, scary site. Marc Bergeron's dye job was also scary, but sort of fun-scary considering his own-goal in the playoffs. But Owen Nolan putting the hurt on, frustrating a young Pronger into yet-another bad penalty, and scoring from center-ice? That was fun.

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I don’t like the league. I like the Wings. I’m not an "NHL fan", only a Wing fanatic.  I like Wing fans. I don’t like many fans of other teams.  I believe the Wings are the greatest franchise in all of sport and if you want to argue with me I’ll insult you in public because I’m narrow-minded and trivial like that.

-the Chief, A2Y

That, in a nutshell, is why I no longer try to talk hockey with Wings fans. Because usually it's not a discussion, it's a feces-slinging match where the only variable is when you've had enough. It's not fun, it's not informative, and there's a fundamental lack of respect for you if you aren't a Wings supporter. Love the game? Love your team? You're deluded and inferior.

Maybe if Detroit has another extended period of lack of success, their fans will stop being so self-obsessed and dickish. In the meantime, I'm avoiding the monkey cage entirely.